Drawing

This current ongoing project involves the filming of a performative drawing which reacts to restriction of space and physical movement during the current global pandemic and comments on her artistic labour, its production and its failure in such times. ‘Making mountains out of ______________ ‘ is a response in time to a reading of Algerian-French philosopher Albert Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus through charcoal drawn movement; rolling and scraping, monotonous and repetitive in a reflection of Sisyphus’s futile labour; where he must repeatedly roll a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll down again.Ciara constructs her drawing through these restricted movements, mapping out imagined paths of both Sisyphus and his rock, becoming a moving part of the composition herself within the drawing plane. The work adopts Camus’s absurdist views (which he applies to the Greek myth), of neither giving in to circumstantial disappointment or trying to escape from failure, persevering, nevertheless.

The production of these large scale charcoal drawings draw on the relationship we have with the modernist built environment and the values or lack thereof we impose on it. A result of fieldwork and archival research of these defunct architectural structures, the artist is fascinated by certain aspects of Utopian mid-century modernism such as the retro futuristic legacy of the popular 1960’s animation, The Jetsons. Her solo exhibition title is derived from an early docu-fiction by the artist Robert Smithson titled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”, 1967 which records a journey through an industrial wasteland where the artist re-imagines rusty pipelines, buildings and bridges as monuments. Taking her lead from the space aged optimism of mid-century architecture and invention, Ciara shares the desire of Smithson to apply her own fiction to less appreciated landscapes, re-imagining what’s already there

Investigating uncanny vistas and defunct, disappearing buildings and technologies, Ciara researched theories surrounding the modern ruin, such as the contradiction between the utopic ideals of Modernity and its current tendency to evoke ideas of alienation, crime and dystopia. For her, the solid aesthetics and materials of Modernist and Brutalist architecture challenge an increasingly less physical and less truthful relationship with the world.